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    SubjectRe: backing up ext4 fs, system unresponsive, thrashing like crazy even though swap is unused
    On Sun 25-11-12 21:30:00, Dimitrios Apostolou wrote:
    > On Sun, 2012-11-25 at 15:55 +0200, Dimitrios Apostolou wrote:
    > > on an old PIII-500MHz laptop, 128MB RAM, kernel 3.6.6, I started a
    > > backup process (tar|xz -4, nice'd and ionice'd -c3) from ext4 on local
    > > ATA disk to ext3 on external USB disk (USB-2.0 port on PCMCIA card).
    > > Even though earlier system load was minimal, free memory was plenty, the
    > > system now is unresponsive and is thrashing the disk, but the swapfile
    > > is rarely touched.
    >
    > I'm now having the same experience even though I replaced xz (which
    > needed ~50MB RAM) with gzip. Even though I feel the realtime root shell
    > is a bit more responsive than before, the OOM killer is out killing
    > small processes like syslog-ng and systemd-logind... The
    > ext4_inode_cache slab is taking almost all my memory (117MB). Please
    > advise!
    Hmm, it seems commit 4eff96dd5283a102e0c1cac95247090be74a38ed might be
    interesting for you. It landed in -stable kernels recently as well if I
    remember right...

    Honza

    --
    Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
    SUSE Labs, CR


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